Mismarked mail - AWL

[Matt Kettler]

It's unfortunate that having a single global AWL is such a double-edged
sword. The biggest benefits of the AWL show up when you use it globally,
unfortunately the problems with it increase by a few orders of magnitude
making it a trouble-causing nightmare.

It *can* work, but it has some seriously unexpected side effects that most
people aren't aware of.

I'm also not a big fan of the AWL in general as I fear it will eventually
encourage spammers to send you "bursts" of messages. 1 low scoring nonspam
message to get themselves a whitelist entry followed by a spam message. If
the first message scores zero, the second will need to score a 10 to get
tagged with the default settings.

I've not seen that sort of behavior yet, but it's not something I'd like to
encourage. I'm a strong proponent of the "let the merits of each email
stand upon it's own" approach, with manual whitelist_from_rcvd entries to
allow in spamish newsletters of your choosing. Of course, that's a lot more
work than just turning on the AWL, but it's by far less prone to error too.




At 09:02 PM 11/12/2002 +0000, Julian Field wrote:
>Methinks I might want to change the default value in the distribution.
>Thanks for doing the thorough analysis.